Transcript

China is now producing more carbon dioxide emissions than the United
States. Lester Graham reports experts expected China to become the
leader in CO2 emissions, but not so soon:

Just last year, experts were predicting China CO2 emissions would
exceed U.S. emissions by as soon as 2009. Turns out, China was already
there.

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency estimates China’s CO2
emissions for last year, 2006, were 8% higher than the United States.
CO2 is the main greenhouse gas which most scientists believe is
contributing to climate change and global warming.

Expanding Chinese industry relies more heavily on coal for fuel than
many U.S. based industries. The new estimate will likely fuel
President George Bush’s arguments that China and other developing
nations must do more to reduce emissions.

But… the 300 million people in the U.S. are still pumping out four times the CO2 emissions
per person than China with its more than 1 billion people.

Transcript

A new study in the journal Ecology finds that in the animal world,
there are worse things than being eaten alive. Rebecca Williams
reports:

Getting eaten by a predator might be bad, but it might be just the
beginning of the bad news for prey.

Scientists looked at the effects of an invasive species in the Great
Lakes called the spiny water flea. The water fleas eat tiny creatures
called daphnia. In the study, daphnia swam to deeper, colder water to
get away from the predator.

Scott Peacor is a fisheries scientist with Michigan State University
and the Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab:

“Prey of course do all sorts of things to avoid becoming a meal. In this case,
the daphnia swimming down to colder waters means they reproduce at much
slower rates. So that’s a major cost in this case.”

So instead of one daphnia getting eaten, the entire population is at
greater risk of dying off. And that’s bad because daphnia are a key
food source at the bottom of the Great Lakes food web.

For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Today we have the latest installment in our series about people’s connections to nature.
Producer Kyle Norris wanted to find out what younger people thought of the outside world.
She spoke with one young man who said that nature can blow your mind:

Transcript

Today we have the latest installment in our series about people’s connections to nature.
Producer Kyle Norris wanted to find out what younger people thought of the outside world.
She spoke with one young man who said that nature can blow your mind:

Jacoby Simmons is your regular nineteen-year-old guy. He goes to community college
and loves to hang out with his friends and skateboard. He’s also a DJ, and he spins records at
parties as a part-time gig.

Just about every day, Jacoby spends some time hanging outside. Sitting on a park bench. Going for
a walk. But things weren’t always this way. As a kid, his life was about eating cereal and
watching TV:

“I guess nature seemed to find me in a way… I don’t remember when I started just
sitting and watching trees. And watching the clouds go by very slowly and trying to see
what images are in the clouds and whatnot.”

Jacoby says as he started to notice the world around him, it changed the way he felt:

“I stayed up all night one night just playing video games, ’cause I’m a loser like that, but I
saw the sunrise and it really, it sounds weird but it really put me at ease. I felt like
complete peace when I saw the sun come up. I mean, just
knowing that life keeps going no matter what.”

You probably get what Jacoby is saying, right? I mean, when I see the sunrise, it makes me feel
like, ‘Yeah planet, we get another day!’ Anyway, Jacoby has this other memory about
nature that’s also pretty special to him:

“Watching stars. The first time I actually looked at the stars, and I don’t mean just go
outside and oh, there are the stars, I mean like go outside and sit in the nighttime and
watch stars. That really blew my mind. It was actually the first time I went on the
backpacking trip a couple of years ago. Because there were no street lights because there
is no extra light, period. You’re in the woods and it’s total darkness and you look up and
I’ve never, ever, ever seen that many stars at that time. I almost cried because it was so
mind-boggling that there were so many stars that I just couldn’t see anywhere else.

(Norris:) “What did it look like?”

“It looked like…I guess you could say the sky looked like a big pitcher of blue Kool-Aid
and salt. Cause the stars were bright and looked like salt. It made me realize there’s just
more to life than just like school and work and making money and trying to stabilize your
life. I don’t know. Oh man, that was crazy, that was nuts.”

Have you ever had a moment like that out in nature? Where you were just totally blown
out of the water? You could.

Ocean vessel loading grain at elevator in Superior, Wisconsin. Nine foreign ships have been identified in the lawsuit against international shipping companies. (Photo by Jerry Bielicki, USACOE)

Even if ballast water is pumped out of ships, puddles and sediment usually remain at the bottom of the tank, both of which can contain non-native living organisms. (Photo courtesy of NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory)

For decades foreign ships have brought tiny stowaways – called invasive
species – into the United States. And once they get loose, they upend
ecosystems and cause billions of dollars in damage. The shipping
industry has yet to seriously address the problem, and now conservation
and environmental groups are suing the companies they say are most at
fault. Mark Brush has more:
http://environmentreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/feature_brush_062507.mp3

Transcript

For decades foreign ships have brought tiny stowaways – called invasive
species – into the United States. And once they get loose, they upend
ecosystems and cause billions of dollars in damage. The shipping
industry has yet to seriously address the problem, and now conservation
and environmental groups are suing the companies they say are most at
fault. Mark Brush has more:

In 1988, the now infamous zebra mussel slipped out of a ship’s ballast
tank near Detroit. It didn’t take long for it to spread, first
throughout the Great Lakes, then through the Ohio and Mississpi rivers,
then on to Alabama and Oklahoma, and now it’s as far west as Nevada.

The mussels clog up intake pipes at water and power plants and mess up
the food chain. In some places in the Great Lakes, they’ve severely
damaged the sport fishing industry.

And that’s the damage just one foreign pest can do. More than a
hundred have gotten in and more are on the way. The government has
done little to stop the spread of these pests from foreign ships. In
2005, a federal court in California ordered the EPA to set up a system.
The EPA appealed that ruling.

Andy Buchsbaum is the Director of the National Wildlife Federation’s
Great Lakes office. He says ballast water from foreign ships should be
regulated:

“The law is very clear. The Clean Water Act says you cannot discharge
pollution into navigable waters, like the Great Lakes, without first
obtaining a permit. Period. Any discharge without a permit
is illegal.”

So, instead of waiting for the EPA to act, several environmental and
conservation groups, including Buchsbaum’s group, say they are planning
to sue several shipping companies that operate ocean-going boats on the
Great Lakes. They’re targeting nine boats they feel are the biggest
violators.

Industry representatives have said that ballast water regulations would
hurt international shipping, but in the Great Lakes, it’s estimated
that ocean-going ships make up only 6% of the overall tonnage.

Joel Brammeier is with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, one of the
groups that intends to sue the ship owners. He says a few ocean-going
boats have caused a lot of damage:

“The cost savings that we’re seeing from allowing unregulated ocean
shipping on the Lakes pales compared to the economic burden that
invasive species are placing on the Lakes. That’s stunning. The
ocean-going shipping industry is actually bringing in less than the
region is losing because of the things that ocean going ships
unintentionally bring in.”

The environmental and conservation groups who intend to sue say there
are ballast water cleaning technologies available now. The National
Wildlife Federation’s Andy Buchsbaum says they’re willing to back off
their lawsuit if the ship owners promise to clean up their ballast
water:

“This legal action is not designed to shut down the shipping industry
in the Great Lakes. That is not our intention. Our intention is to
get these guys to comply with the Clean Water Act. And that means
putting on treatment technology and getting permits.”

The shipping industry says it needs more time. Steve Fisher is with
the American Great Lakes Ports Association. He concedes there are some
technologies to clean up ballast water:

“I’ll be very frank with you. There’s technologies out there that will
do something.”

(Brush:) “So, why not use those?”

“Because a ship owner needs to know how high the bar is before he jumps
over it.”

In other words the ship owners won’t clean up their ballast water until
the federal government tells them how clean is clean, and so far, the
federal government hasn’t done that.

The EPA and the shipping industry say they’re working on the decades
old problem, but the groups that intend to sue say they’re not moving
fast enough. More invasive species are getting in. They’re hoping the threat of a
lawsuit will help force more action sooner.

Exposed to toxic chemicals such as lead and mercury, workers stay at the scrap yards for the $130-a-month pay. (photo by Ted Land)

Copper wire is stripped, circuit boards melted and other parts burned to retrieve metal from old electronic equipment in illegal scrap yards in China. (Photo by Ted Land)

Although China banned electronic waste, illegal operations still take American E-waste to retrieve precious metals and some throw the leftovers into the river. (Photo by Ted Land)

Many workers say this is better than family scrap yards where American e-waste fuels toxic fires across the countryside. (photo by Ted Land)

Like many large electronic equipment buyers, the State of Illinois was surprised to find its old equipment was being shipped overseas to scrap yards. (Photo by Ted Land)

High school students test the water for pollutants. They take their results to government officials who have little power to stop the e-waste imports. (photo by Ted Land)

At your home, chances are your TV, computer and other electronic gear were made
overseas. That’s because it’s cheaper to make them there. And it’s cheaper to get rid of old
electronics overseas. Someday, your old cell phone or CD player might end up right back
where it started: in China. Ted Land visited a Chinese city where electronic waste, or e-waste, is shipped by the thousands of tons. Pollution from that waste is threatening the
health of people who live there:
http://environmentreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/feature_land_062507.mp3

Transcript

At your home, chances are your TV, computer and other electronic gear were made
overseas. That’s because it’s cheaper to make them there. And it’s cheaper to get rid of old
electronics overseas. Someday, your old cell phone or CD player might end up right back
where it started: in China. Ted Land visited a Chinese city where electronic waste , or e-
waste, is shipped by the thousands of tons. Pollution from that waste is threatening the
health of people who live there:

The city of Taizhou is in eastern China. It’s an industrial port city. A lot of the people
who travel here are here on business. Ships loaded with new products are often headed
for the United States. But it’s not just what leaves this city that makes business boom…
it’s also what’s coming in:

“I know it’s polluted here but it’s not a big deal. The most important thing is my
children, that’s the reason why I found work here.”

Liu Qinzhen works at this Taizhou scrap plant. It’s the final stop for some of the nearly
4,000 tons of scrap and e-waste that enters the port each day. Liu is one of hundreds of
workers who squat under an outdoor pavilion picking apart old circuit boards and wires.
She works 9 hours a day, 7 days a week, earning about 130 dollars a month.

The work is dangerous. She and the other workers are exposed to harmful chemicals
from e-waste such as lead and mercury. The 23-year-old moved here for this job because
she needed to support her two kids:

“I used to work in a shoe factory but then I had a baby and it’s not convenient to have a
baby there so I moved here even though the pay is the same. I come from the countryside.
You can’t earn money on a farm.”

The plant where she works is considered safer than scrapping these materials in the
countryside where families work in their front yards and in their homes. They melt
circuit boards and burn wires to extract bits of valuable copper and gold.

Environmental organizations have documented evidence that what’s left over after the
valuable metals are retrieved is dumped into local rivers and streams:

(Land:) “I noticed when we arrived they shut down the other door of that other shop?

“They are doing the same kind of e-waste, but they are afraid of being discovered by
others.”

Afraid, says Taizhou resident Chen Yijun because what they’re doing is illegal. Chinese
law forbids the import of e-waste, yet piles of foreign electronics litter the countryside
and pour into scrap plants daily.

Yijun is a teacher at Taizhou #1 High School, where students are concerned about what
the e-waste industry is doing to their environment. They’ve been testing the water in
local streams, looking for signs of harmful chemicals:

On this day they draw several gallons from a stream. The banks are littered with piles of
electrical cable. Chen Zhengyan has been working on the project for years:

“The frogs here are different from frogs in other places because sometimes they have
extra limbs. We are sure the pollution is from e-waste because in this area there is no
other industry.”

Chen and her colleagues say this pollution is harmful to people, too. They tell local
government officials such as Liang Xiaoyong that something has to be done to improve
the situation. But, Liang says there’s only so much the government can do to combat an
illegal industry that so many residents make their living off of. He says cutting off the
imports is difficult because sometimes e-waste is hidden in with other scrap. He doesn’t
deny the waste industry is a big business here:

This industry generates a lot of tax money for us in the form of tariffs. So, if this industry
doesn’t exist, the Taizhou harbor won’t survive.

Jim Puckett is coordinator of the Basel Action Network, a Seattle based group that
confronts toxic trade issues around the world. He says it’s not that the Chinese
government is unwilling to stop imports, it’s simply unable to stop them.

“They’ve banned the import, the problem is they can’t control that flow, it’s just coming at
them container load after container load through various ports and they can’t possibly check every
single one.”

American waste is literally fueling the fires burning electronics that dot the countryside in
China. And many of the original owners of this gear had taken it to be recycled, and
thought they’d done the right thing. But, often it ends up on a ship, headed for scrap
yards overseas.

About seven thousand miles away from Taizhou, practically the other side of the globe,
there’s a warehouse in Springfield, Illinois stacked with old electronic gear.

The Illinois State Department of Central Management Services, or CMS, disposes of old
state property, including old copy machines, computers, and monitors. In 2005, CMS
was contacted by the Basel Action Network with some disturbing information. The
group was finding State of Illinois computers dumped in developing countries around the
world. Curtis Howard is manager of CMS state and federal surplus property:

“It hit me pretty hard, the fact that, not realizing, you know I always look at it, these guys
were here, they come in, they bid on our property, you know I’m maximizing the return on
the state’s investment, I’m doing a good job, I never really thought about the tail end of
the dragon.”

Basel Action Network coordinator Jim Puckett says if the Chinese are unable to stop the
imports, then it’s up to the United States to control what they export:

Other countries have laws forbidding it, laws controlling it, but in the United States, we
don’t even have a law to control this export.

The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that have not signed and ratified the Basel
Convention, an international treaty that bans hazardous waste exports. That means if
anything is going to be done to stop electronic waste from polluting countries overseas,
it’s going to be up to the States to take action.

It starts with buying electronics from companies that make products that are more easily
recycled, and ends with making sure old electronic gear is getting into the hands of
responsible recyclers who don’t simply ship the e-waste to scrap yards overseas.

Transcript

Air pollution from chicken, cattle and pig farms will be studied for the first time
on a nationwide basis. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

More farms have large numbers of animals, and more non-farm neighbors are complaining
about odors and potential health risks from air emissions. The EPA has said for several years that
it doesn’t have enough data to tell whether big farms comply with existing air pollution laws. So
the government will team up with some universities on a two-year, 15-million dollar study at 24
farms in nine states.

EPA Administrator Steve Johnson says the results will be used to estimate emissions from future
large farms:

“That they will have the benefit of the ability to model and predict what air emissions may happen
that would enable us for them and for us to take preventative action.”

As part of a legal agreement the agriculture industry will help pay for the air pollution study.

Transcript

The federal government has no comprehensive plan to deal with an expected
increase in the production of biofuels. That’s according to a new study from
the Government Accountability Office. Dustin Dwyer reports that the lack of
a plan has some real consequences:

Mark Gaffigan studies energy issues for the GAO. He says there are real problems
getting biofuel capable vehicles where they need to be. For example, when officials at the Post Office tried to buy these so-called flex-fuel vehicles, the only options available were trucks with a larger engine than it needed. On top of that, officials had trouble getting biofuel, so they just ran the vehicles on gasoline.

“So, in effect, what you had was the government with vehicles using more fuel, using
more oil because they weren’t as efficient, when the intent was to try to encourage people
to use flex-fuel vehicles and use some of this ethanol to displace oil.”

The GAO says the Secretary of Energy needs to develop a new strategy that considers
both the production and distribution of biofuels.

Transcript

Armadillos are moving out of Southern states and are pushing into the
Midwest in record numbers. Adam Allington reports:

Prior to the 1900s, armadillos were hemmed in by large rivers and open
prairie grasslands that weren’t suitable habitat. Now, all that’s changed.
Humans have cultivated the kind of woodlands and thickets that armadillos
need for cover.

Lynn Robbins is a biology professor at Missouri State University:

We’re getting a lot more records in central Illinois, we’re getting more records up into
Nebraska, we’ve found them now moving up into Indiana… have no records so far in
Iowa, I would not be surprised if somebody called and said ‘yes, they’re here.'”

Robbins says warmer winters and lower average snowfall are one hypothesis
for the expanding armadillo range. They are also prolific breeders and have
no natural predators.

For the Environment Report, I’m Adam Allington

Related Links

The US Environmental Protection Agency plans to begin testing
hundreds of pesticides to see if they disrupt human hormones. Tracy
Samilton reports that environmental groups aren’t satisfied with the
plan. They say the research is too little, too late:

Transcript

The US Environmental Protection Agency plans to begin testing
hundreds of pesticides to see if they disrupt human hormones. Tracy
Samilton reports that environmental groups aren’t satisfied with the
plan. They say the research is too little, too late:

Ten years ago, the EPA was directed by Congress to test pesticides to
see if they interfere with human hormones which control everything from
metabolism to reproduction. Now the EPA says it will take two more
years before it will start studying a short list of 73 pesticides.

The agency will eventually test all 700 or so pesticides on the market.
The Natural Resources Defense Council says the testing could eventually
lead to banning some harmful pesticides. But the environmental group
says the EPA dragged its feet on the study for far too long. And the
NRDC complains the short list includes chemicals already known to
disrupt hormones.

Chances are your doctor doesn’t know much about environmentally-related
illnesses. Ann Murray looks at why most US doctors and nurses aren’t even
talking about environmental connections to their patients’ health and what’s
being done to remedy the situation:

Transcript

Chances are your doctor doesn’t know much about environmentally-related
illnesses. Ann Murray looks at why most US doctors and nurses aren’t even
talking about environmental connections to their patients’ health and what’s
being done to remedy the situation:

In 1999, Jo Ann Meier was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was shocked
to discover she had the disease. No one in her family had a history of cancer.
And she only had one of the standard risk factors for the illness:

“Of course, you always speculate when you have a disease like this. Was it
something I did or was it something that I was exposed to?”

Meier says her doctors never talked to her about possible environmental
links to her illness. Today, Meier is cancer free and runs a non-profit that
raises money for breast cancer research. She hears similar stories about other
primary care physicians from the breast cancer patients she works with every
day.

“There’s a great deal of anger about the misinformation or lack of
information given to them in general. I mean, it would be great if your PCP would
say you have to look at what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis that might
be affecting your health.”

Jo Ann Meier’s experience isn’t unusual. Experts agree that most doctors and
nurses aren’t ready to deal with the environmental links to dozens of
illnesses like cancer or lung disease. Sometimes crowded doctors’ schedules
or fear of being seen as an environmental advocate get in the way. Leyla
McCurdy directs the Health and Environment Program at the National
Environmental Educational and Training Foundation in Washington, DC.
McCurdy says medical providers don’t know much about environmental
health issues because training is so hard to come by.

One of the challenges that we are facing in terms of integrating environmental
health is the lack of expertise in the area. There are very few leaders who
are willing to take the time and create their own materials to educate the
students at the medical and nursing schools:

“As a result of this small pool of experts, and an already crowded set of
courses, most med students get only about seven hours of environmental
health education in four years of school. Established doctors and nurses have
even fewer training options.

A small but growing number of health care institutions, non-profits and
agencies are stepping in to fill the training gap. On this morning, medical
residents and staff doctors crowd into a hospital lecture hall.

“Welcome to medical grand rounds. Our speaker today is Doctor Talal ElHanowe,
who is going to talk to us about estrogenic pollutants in the environment and
the risk they pose to people.”

“Can these chemicals, which resemble estrogen, in one way or the other, cause an increase in the risk
to develop cancer? And the answer is yes.”

ElHanowe is a medical doctor and research scientist. He works with the
University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Environmental Oncology. The Center
is developing environmental health training for doctors and nurses. After his
seminar, ElHanowe says response to the program has been good. But his job
of relating environmental health risks can be tough because doctors aren’t
used to treating diseases with causes that are hard to pin down.

“In the scientific community, we can’t prove everything. Many things are
very difficult to prove.”

ElHanowe’s boss, Devra Davis, says medical providers will have to be
satisfied with substantial evidence, not absolute proof, that certain
environmental toxins increase the risk of illnesses, and steer patients to safer
alternatives. Davis is a nationally known epidemiologist. She says
environmental medicine’s emphasis on prevention is the shot in the arm
American health care needs:

“Because no matter how efficient the health care system becomes at finding
and treating disease, if we don’t reduce the burden of the disease itself, we’ll
never be able to improve the health of Americans.”

But to make environmental medicine standard issue in schools and practice,
a lot more doctors and nurses will need to be educated. And that means a lot
more funding. It’s hoped as medical providers make the connection between
environmental exposures and public health, funding sources will open up
and environmental medicine will make its way into mainstream health care.